"The Souls of Lost Lake" by Jamie Jo Wright

Oh my.  This was very creepy.  So creepy, I almost quit reading it about halfway through because I was afraid it was going to give me nightmares.  But I decided to read a couple more chapters, and then eerie and creepy things started getting real-life explanations, and I went ahead and finished the book.  It turns out that all the ghostly and creepy things were totally explainable and due to secret human activity, and there were no hauntings.  There definitely were horrible murders in the past, and those were hard to read about, but they weren't what was creeping me out anyway.

This is one of those split-timeline books where you have one storyline going on in the present day, and another in the past.  The present-day story is about a young woman named Arwen who lives at and works for a Christian camp in the north woods of Wisconsin.  She is helping with a search for a missing little girl who disappeared near the camp.  In the process, she digs up a lot of information about her own past.

In the past story, it's the 1930s, and there's a young woman named Ava Coons whose whole family was killed in a bloody and terrifying way when she was a child.  Their bodies disappeared, and her family home burned to the ground -- only Ava escaped, and she was covered in blood and dragging a massive, bloody axe when she was found by people of the small Wisconsin town nearby.  Even though Ava had no memory of what happened to her family, and clearly was too small and weak to even heft the axe she was dragging, many people still thought she killed her family.  A decade later, a person from that town is killed with an axe, and many people want Ava arrested for the crime.  About the only person who believes she is innocent is a new minister who isn't very well known in the area yet.  Ava starts to fall for him, even while trying to figure out how to prove she isn't now and never has been a killer.

The burned-down Coons cabin also plays into Arwen's story, and she lives near the small town where Ava grew up after her family died.  

I devoured this book in three days because I absolutely had to know how everything turned out.  I've been assured by some friends that the rest of Wright's books are not this creepy, so I think I will try another, one of these days.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for creepiness, discussions of murder victims, lots of innuendo, and scenes of a child being in peril.  I would not hand this to any of my teens to read, to be honest.  But it's also not really R-rated.